Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Too close to home: Nonfiction, by Julie Myerson, reviewed

Myerson again addresses the devastating effect on a family of drug addiction – this time in a deeply personal novel

Julie Myerson. [Getty Images] 
issue 04 June 2022

Julie Myerson has, somewhat confusingly, written a novel called Nonfiction. The confusion of course is the point, because this is her squarest attempt so far at auto-biographical fiction. The French author Serge Doubrovsky is widely credited with writing the first ‘autofiction’ when he published Fils in 1977. Autobiographical novels have proliferated ever since, notably by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk and Edward St Aubyn.

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